Our Mission at CafeGetaway is to provide the highest
quality vacation rental properties available. Our
vacation rentals are cabins, cottages, villas and condos,
and
even a castle or two! If you are looking for a rental
for your family vacation in
Maine
then you've come to the right place!

Please take your time and visit as many of our vacation
rental listings as you want and when you find one or
more that you like please either email the owner using
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Maine Travel Guide

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As big as the other five New England
states combined, MAINE barely has the population of tiny Rhode
Island. In theory, therefore, there's plenty of room for its
massive summer influx of visitors; in reality, the majority of
these make for the southern stretches of the extravagantly corrugated
coast . You only really begin to appreciate the size and space
of the state further north, or inland , where vast tracts of
mountainous forest are dotted with lakes, and barely pierced
by roads - more like the Alaskan interior than the RV-cluttered
roads of the Vermont and New Hampshire mountains, and ideal territory
for hiking and canoeing (and moose spotting).

Although Maine is in many ways inhospitable - the Algonquin
called it "Land of the Frozen Ground" - it has been
in contact with Europe ever since the arrival of the Vikings
, around 1000 AD. For the navigator Verrazano, in 1524, the "crudity
and evil manners" of the Indians made this the "Land
of Bad People," but before long European fishermen were
setting up camps each summer to dry their catch. Francis Bacon
in turn said that the English were "worse than the very
Savages, impudently lying with their Women, teaching their
men to drink drunke, and ? to fall together by the eares."

North America's first agricultural colonies were in Maine:
de Champlain's French Protestants near Mount Desert Island
in 1604, and an English group that survived one winter at the
mouth of the Kennebec three years later. In the face of the
unwillingness of subsequent English settlers to let them farm
in peace, the local Indians formed a long-term alliance with
the French, and until as late as 1700 regularly drove out streams
of impoverished English refugees. By 1764, however, the official
census could claim that even Maine's black population was
more numerous than its Native Americans.

Originally part of Massachusetts, Maine became a separate
entity only in 1820, when the Missouri Compromise made Maine
a free state, and Missouri a slave state. In the nineteenth
century, its people had a reputation for conservatism and resistance
to immigration, manifested in anti-Irish riots. The state's
economy has always been heavily based on the sea, although
many of those who fish also farm, and long expeditions are
now rare. Recently they have been selling their catch direct
to Russian factory ships anchored just offshore. Lobster fishing
in particular has defied gloomy predictions and has boomed
again as evidenced by the many thriving lobster pounds.

Maine's climate is famously harsh. In winter, most of Maine
is under ice; summer is short and usually heralded in early
June by an infestation of tiny black flies. Fall colors begin
to spread from the north in late September - when, unlike elsewhere
in New England, off-season prices apply - but temperatures
drop sharply, becoming quite frosty by mid-October.